Keeping your Desktop Tidy

Monday, March 01 2010

By: chrisb

Organizing your temporary files

Desktop View Options
Click to see a larger image

Is your Desktop covered with icons? It is easy to save everything to your Desktop and before you know it you have a huge jumble of icons and you can't find anything.

Many of the files that you create are only useful for a certain period of time. Such a file might be a travel confirmation or a memo you are working on or components of a larger project. The Desktop is a good place to save such temporary files. But to keep your Desktop under control, every so often you need to either trash these temporary files or move them to a more permanent location like the Documents folder.

Beside keeping things tidy, there is a quirk in Mac OS X that makes your computer run a little slower for each file on your Desktop.

Try these actions to give your Desktop a makeover:

Only save files that are likely to be temporary to your Desktop. If you know that you will need to keep a file, save it in your Documents folder.
Right-click on the desktop and choose "Show View Options." Check "Show item info", Show icon preview", and "Keep arranged by Name." Select Label position to be "Right." These view options will snap your icons into an organized list and show you more information about the files without needing to open them.
Go to Finder Preferences and to the General section. Uncheck all the "Show these items on the Desktop" checkboxes. Your hard drives, CD and connected servers are all shown in the Finder Sidebar so they don't need to be on the desktop as well.
Create a folder called "_Desktop Items" on your Desktop. (That is an underscore character at the beginning of the filename. That will insure that your _Desktops items folder will always be at the top of the list of files.

My Made Over Desktop
Click to see a larger image

Now whenever the desktop starts to look a little crowded, do a little sorting:

The files you don't need anymore, drag to the Trash.
The files you need to keep, drag to your Documents folder
If you aren't sure or just want to keep a file in limbo, drag it to the _Desktop Items folder for later sorting. (Danger: If all you do is drag all the files off of your desktop and into the _Desktop Items folder, then all you have done is moved your mess from one place to another. Use the _Desktop Items folder sparingly.)

With a little work, you can keep the thousands of files you accumulate over time under control.